FOREWORD TO SIXTH EDITION

My father never said what or who actually inspired him to write The Legal Aspect of Money . His formation, including his doctoral thesis Die Sachgrundung in Aktienrecht (The payment for shares in kind) at Berlin University, was in the field of company law. However, he must have had a latent awareness of problems of monetary law and practice. He was the grandson of a banker, partner of Mann and Loeb in Frankenthal in the Palatinate, which was sold to a predecessor bank of the Deutsche Bank in 1913. His father was concerned in liquidating some of the banks affairs after 1918 and my father was a trainee for a short time in the successor bank. He grew up amid the uncertainties of currency exchange rates and restrictions in the French zone of occupation and during the great inflation in Germany. An intimate friend of his father since schooldays was Karl Hellferich, a pupil of Georg Friederich Knapp and author of the well-known book on money, whose dazzling bureaucratic and business career, as well as his extreme political views, must have meant that his name was frequently mentioned. Two of his professors at Berlin University, Martin Wolff and Arthur Nussbaum, each wrote on the law of money and would have discussed the legal consequences of the stabilisation of the mark in 1924. Finally the famous case of Adelaide Electric Supply Co v Prudential Assurance Co in 1934 was at the right moment for someone of his background, anxious to establish himself. My father wrote, in the summer of 1936 I had decided to write a book on the law of money: a number of cases which were before the courts in those years appeared to make a systematic investigation and presentation of the subject necessary, particularly since no work on it in the English language was available.

Since my fathers death on 16 September 1991, correspondence has been found in the archives of Oxford University Press (OUP). In particular the readers of the original manuscript are revealed, about whom my father often asked, but never discovered. His letter of 15 December 1937 addressed to OUP reads: I write to ask whether you would be prepared to publish a book which I have just completed the questions dealt with in the book are at the present moment of great practical importance. On 18 December my father was requested to be good enough to forward us your MSS and a further letter on 7 January 1938 states We are having your manuscript read but fear that there will be a little delay before we can come to a decision. An internal memorandum to Sir Humphrey Milford, the publisher, refers to a previous proposal from my father in January 1934 (he had arrived in England in October 1933), to translate and explain the new German company law, which had been declined, and goes on to say that there is a considerable risk that the [book] would either be too much a book of the moment or too vague to be useful. Unfortunately Cheshire who would have advised is just leaving for a tour of Malaya.

On 30 December 1937, Kenneth Sisam of OUP asked Albert Feaveryear, author of The Pound Sterling (1931) to read the manuscript. Feaveryear replied on 10 January I have no hesitation in saying that it [the book] should be most carefully considered for publication Dr Mann must be regarded as having written, I think, a pioneer work. In order to obtain an opinion on the international law, on the advice of Professor J.L. Brierly, the manuscript was sent to Professor D.J. Llewellyn Davies at Birmingham University. He answered on 22 March 1938: I find that Dr Mann does his work with extraordinary thoroughness and I do not believe that there can be any questions as to his accuracy. This is entirely in keeping with the opinion which I found of his work when I was a member of the staff of London University when he used to attend my seminars in Private International Law .